Still no Fire Nerfs and Frost Gets a New Mastery. Further updates at p22

Is anyone else getting kind of worried that there have been no fire mage nerfs yet?

Considering that fire already does more damage than arcane, fire also has mega mobility that arcane doesn't. If fire DOESN'T get a nerf, it's going to be un-viable to be anything but fire if you plan on trying to progress next tier and pull the top numbers that a mage can pull. I love arcane, and want to stay it. But if fire doesn't recieve a nerf, or frost/arcane don't get buffed....With the heavy movement that looks like is coming next tier...We may have to go fire if we want to pull way ahead of arcane/frost. And it saddens me.

Gonna do some edits to update people on the current thread discussions and points made

Fire was nerfed

Fire was un-nerfed

Frost was given a new mastery

Arcane still sucks at moving while casting

Siege of orgrimmar will be movement heavy

Just some tidbits of the convo's we've been having.

We're expecting more nerfs to bring it in check so it doesn't scale exponentially to infinite as lore says, and hopefully bring it in line with the other mage specs.

No damage pass on the PTR yet (when you see a PTR notes with a whole bunch of classes getting x% more to this spell, X% less to that spell - that's your damage pass). So no, not worried at all. If I had to offer a guess I'd bet that they would lower the scaling slightly on pyroblast, by like 5% or so.

Is anyone else getting kind of worried that there have been no fire mage nerfs yet?

Considering that fire already does more damage than arcane, fire also has mega mobility that arcane doesn't. If fire DOESN'T get a nerf, it's going to be un-viable to be anything but fire if you plan on trying to progress next tier and pull the top numbers that a mage can pull. I love arcane, and want to stay it. But if fire doesn't recieve a nerf, or frost/arcane don't get buffed....With the heavy movement that looks like is coming next tier...We may have to go fire if we want to pull way ahead of arcane/frost. And it saddens me.

Am expecting a combustion nerf. Fire really don't need a nerf outside combustion being way too strong at least if we can cleave it with 100% damage, and the spec still has the weakest of AoE and multitarget that ain't cleave, so for those fights doing more cleave/single target simply wont matter much. But hell its blizzard.. they might not nerf fire till we get some more mastery gear with fire, then realise what they have done and nerf CM and Pyro again, which leads to fire not working again for progression..

Also many people love fire, do you want them to suffer? Fire honestly ain't that much ahead of arcane in terms of dps. Certainly not in terms of viability. Arcane has it's strong points, no ramp up, strong AoE, strong multitarget dotting, strong single target and decent cleave. Only drawback of arcane is the movement imparing that comes from it having no alternative for AB to cast while moving. And well RoP is still crap, but we have IW which will be better overall in almost all progress fights as arcane.

It'll be a CM nerf before a Combustion nerf IMO. CM increases RNG but cuts scaling with gear down a lot. At the moment what's making Fire strong is the potential of running Mage Armor and having a lot of Mastery off reforges and gear without sacrificing a lot of crit because of CM value. Cut CM by .1 perhaps into next tier and Fire won't be completely dead.

Arcane with IW is shite. Theoretical maximum uptime on Rune in perfect play is around 97%, whereas you can go down to ~80% or so and have it still be stronger than IW without using the active, which is now shit for Arcane.
Next tier won't be Arcane friendly, but we'll see.

Originally Posted by fearist

you sound like you want a nerf, get out of here lol.

There's a massive difference between being forced to play a spec for progression purposes because Blizzard doesn't nerf it and having a choice. If Fire remains untouched the amount of Mastery we'll be able to gain off gear will make it too strong, simple as.

It'll be a CM nerf before a Combustion nerf IMO. CM increases RNG but cuts scaling with gear down a lot. At the moment what's making Fire strong is the potential of running Mage Armor and having a lot of Mastery off reforges and gear without sacrificing a lot of crit because of CM value. Cut CM by .1 perhaps into next tier and Fire won't be completely dead.

Well that's only half true, our mastery is rising even if we are using molten armor. This is due hit being 5100 always and we are hitting 5036 haste now and our crit is just maxed, so each new rating you get.. 40% is going to mastery.

Originally Posted by Serene

Arcane with IW is shite. Theoretical maximum uptime on Rune in perfect play is around 97%, whereas you can go down to ~80% or so and have it still be stronger than IW without using the active, which is now shit for Arcane.
Next tier won't be Arcane friendly, but we'll see.

Last time I checked RoP was 175% mana and IW was 165%, so from mana regen it's around 6% difference. As for the damage, only ONE recast at the middle is enough to make IW better, plus you get no benefit from when you are moving.

Originally Posted by Serene

There's a massive difference between being forced to play a spec for progression purposes because Blizzard doesn't nerf it and having a choice. If Fire remains untouched the amount of Mastery we'll be able to gain off gear will make it too strong, simple as.

I was forced to play frost during 5.2 progression.. and I hate frost. So ye..

Even if too strong dps might result in an overblown knee-jerk hotfix nerf on live, I rather have one strong spec than three subpar ones. Arcane also has its uses so the situation is better than in many tiers before.

Well that's only half true, our mastery is rising even if we are using molten armor. This is due hit being 5100 always and we are hitting 5036 haste now and our crit is just maxed, so each new rating you get.. 40% is going to mastery.

Agreed, but if they cut CM instead of Combustion damage more reforging will have to go towards crit again - hence cutting gear scaling a little.

Originally Posted by mrgreenthump

Last time I checked RoP was 175% mana and IW was 165%, so from mana regen it's around 6% difference. As for the damage, only ONE recast at the middle is enough to make IW better, plus you get no benefit from when you are moving.

People very, very often do this maths wrong.
Calculating the bonuses (damage bonuses included) as "175%" or "165%" or "115%" or "106%" are completely wrong. The correct figures to be using are 75% and 65% in terms of regen, 15% and 6% in terms of damage.

In terms of regen:
75*0.8 (80% uptime) - 60%, so lower than IW, BUT, then look at damage.

Damage:
15*0.8 - 12% compared to 6%.

On some of the fights in the new tier (Immerseus being a very good example as that's constant Rune re-casting) sure, IW will indeed pull ahead, but it's still better to use Rune in a lot of situations.

Originally Posted by mrgreenthump

I was forced to play frost during 5.2 progression.. and I hate frost. So ye..

Why you were forced to play Frost is beyond me oO but OK. I literally can't think of a single fight where Frost is outright better than the other two specs.

Anyway, OT:

They haven't done any damage balancing yet at all, it's just set-bonus tweaks and will probably be tweaking the new trinkets a bit as well considering they are insanely strong. But we'll see.